IBM uses Roomba robots to control temperature in data centers

In addition to Roomba vacuum cleaners and military robots, iRobot also sells student and experimenter-oriented “designers” to create programmable robots. iRobot Create is the same vacuum cleaner, only without brushes and a dust bag, but with a set of connectors for programming and connecting user devices. On this platform, many interesting projects have been created . At IBM adaptedsuch robots for continuous monitoring of temperature and humidity in data centers. Knowing where and when it is too hot or cold is critically important for the data center to work reliably and economically. Sowing the entire area with stationary sensors is too expensive and cumbersome, therefore, measurements were periodically carried out manually using mobile equipment.



Small autonomous robots equipped with the necessary set of sensors allow faster and cheaper to find problem areas where the equipment suffers from overheating, or vice versa, cold air is wasted. Roomba has a netbook and a two-meter pole with sensors at different levels and a webcam. Moving around the premises, the robot compiles a map of cold and hot areas, on the basis of which the optimal air conditioning mode is calculated. In 2010, a very similar approach was used in the Indian division of EMC, but this did not go beyond creating an exhibition prototype.

Now in IBM data centers there are already nine such robots. According to IBM engineer Jonathan Lenchner, there will be even more of them during the year. In addition to temperature measurements, robots can read RFID tags from servers and routers. Such a “continuous inventory” allows you not to get confused in the complex economy of a large data center and always know exactly in which room and in which rack each device is located.